I’ve finally got around to reading through the backlog of Guardian arts column articles I had piled up, so here’s some more commentary for you! This is another by the usually-reliable Jonathan Jones – reliable in that he’s almost always flat-out wrong.

He’s terribly disappointed in the limited scope and basic crapness of the artists, but to me they all look really interesting – especially Richard Woods, but then I’m rather a sucker for printing techniques overall.

I wish I’d managed to see the exhibition myself, but that’s timing for you. I’m rather looking forward to seeing the final result, by Tania Kovats.

I think, personally, that Jones is looking at an overly narrow interpretation of Darwin’s ideas, and that “art inspired by Science” must necessarily be about Science. Kovats is primarily a landscape artist, rooted very firmly in the same cultural soil as Darwin was, although it’s evolved and enrichened itself over time, and she’s chosen to focus as much on that soil – the archaeological context for Darwin’s work – as on the strict scientific themes. For something that is going to become part of the fabric of a museum (the closest thing to a permanent context there is) that’s an ideal choice.

The other day, I went to the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Prize Lecture at the Royal Society.

Siân Ede (Arts Director, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) was the lecturer, and it was rather disappointing on the whole. She’s clearly very heavily invested in Big Art, as I suppose you’d expect, and seemed to extend that to Big Science too. Her thesis – as the blurb for the lecture suggests, I suppose – was that Artists are inspired by Science, and occasionally Scientists are inspired by Art. Well… yes. This isn’t exactly news.

New technologies make new kinds of art possible, and new ideas in society inspire artists to comment on them or reflect them, by cheerleading, perversion, or polemic. This is because artists are people, and generally smart people at that – the kind of people who can see something and fall in love with it. Who want to make it the best it can possibly be, or who can’t help but prod and poke it obsessively till all the flaws and failings are out in the open.

And you know what? So are an awful lot of scientists.

I did ask, at the end, about that – “You’ve spoken a lot about artists who work with scientists, and vice versa. What about artists who are scientists themselves?” and her response was pretty unencouraging. It’s not possible to be both, it seems – though she did say there were a few rare exceptions, probably because I’d introduced myself as an artist who used to work in nanomaterials engineering and computer modelling. Being a scientist takes up so much of your time – writing papers, putting in grant proposals, and so on – and so does being an artist.

Bollocks it does. Those aren’t science, or art – those are paperwork. The annoying crap that people like her make you do so you can do the fun wonderful socially useful bit.

And art isn’t solely, or even mostly, Big Art. It’s thousands, millions, of people doing their thing, obsessing over some element of the world in their own way, informed by their own history and experience and knowledge. Big Art does some amazing things, but also some complete lemons (I’m thinking Angel of the North versus Hirst’s diamond skull here – your mileage may differ) and I don’t believe the proportion’s any different there to the rest of art. Big Science (and here I’m including Engineering and Technology, because they all fall into the category of People Doing Wonderfully Cool Things That Never Existed Before) is about the same.

Oh, and speaking of the Angel of the North – if that isn’t art’s response to technology, not much is. Hirst I’ll have to write about some more – she did explain some really interesting things about his work I hadn’t considered before.